Linux to get bet­ter Steam sup­port

EV­ERY PEN­GUIN HAS ITS DAY

VALVE, EVER THE cham­pion of Linux gam­ing, last month an­nounced the re­lease of Steam Play, a new com­pat­i­bil­ity layer for Steam. Cur­rently in beta on an opt-in ba­sis, Steam Play aims to cre­ate a seam­less gam­ing ex­pe­ri­ence for Win­dows-only soft­ware on Linux-based sys­tems. This means Valve has paid at­ten­tion to ev­ery­thing from strong fullscreen sup­port to thor­ough gamepad com­pat­i­bil­ity. This will, hope­fully, negate the sink­ing feel­ing Linux users ex­pe­ri­ence when brows­ing Steam, try­ing to find some­thing to play, only to dis­cover that it’s not Linux com­pat­i­ble.

Valve has op­ti­mised the com­pat­i­bil­ity layer to work with a num­ber of al­ready re­leased games, in­clud­ing Nier: Au­tomata, Quake Cham­pi­ons, and both the orig­i­nal and 2016 ver­sions of Doom. Steam Play beta testers will, by de­fault, only be able to ac­cess games that have been fine-tuned in the com­pat­i­bil­ity layer by Valve, but this lim­i­ta­tion can be over­rid­den — your mileage will vary from ti­tle to ti­tle. Once Steam Play is out of beta, it will be the re­spon­si­bil­ity of stu­dios to en­sure their games are Steam Play com­pat­i­ble.